The French Photograph
by Bellairian
Summary: A WWI photograph of Jack surfaces.
1. Chapter 1

_This is a standalone story that inspired by an article online about an incredible cache of WWI-era glass plate negatives taken by the Thuillier family of Vignacourt, France. The negatives are of British, French, Australian, US, and Indian soldiers, Chinese labor corps, and French civilians. You can find out more about the exhibition 'Remember Me: The Lost Diggers of Vignacourt' at the Australian War Memorial web site._

_20 January: After some careful thought, I've decided inserting a fictional character into the Lost Diggers exhibition might be seen as disrespectful and that is not something I want to do. However, the content of the revised story is almost exactly the same as the original._

xoxox

_Present day_

Elizabeth pondered the photo albums and the box of keepsakes on her desk and made an executive decision. Her daughter Jacqueline needed to become the caretaker of the family hoard, whether she wanted to or not. And it needed to happen soon, while Elizabeth could still remember all the dates and facts and faces.

xoxox

Jacqueline stumbled over the large envelope the postman left on her front porch. It was too big to fit in the letterbox, so he left it leaning against the wall. It must have fallen over during the day. Cursing and muttering under her breath, she grabbed the bulky envelope, shoved it under her arm, and attempted to unlock her front door, get her two children in the house, and close the door firmly before the dog made a beeline for freedom. Chasing the four-legged member of the family through the neighborhood was not on tonight's agenda.

Once in the house, Jacqueline instructed her offspring to go through their backpacks and find any school forms she needed to sign, graded papers she needed to review, and anything else that she needed to know about before they repeated the cycle tomorrow.

She then dumped the armload of her possessions on her desk – keys, sunglasses, humongous handbag, mail, and the envelope she'd nearly tripped over. Her book order. She didn't have the time or the energy to deal with it right now. Dinner needed to be made. Homework needed to be done. Baths needed to be taken. Stories needed to be read. Her husband deserved at least cursory attention when he got home. Somewhere around 10 pm she'd have time to sit down and open the envelope with her new books. Until all of those things were done, her life was not her own.

She looked through the detritus the children left on the kitchen table for her. Her daughter had a reminder for a school excursion tomorrow. Oh lord. She'd forgotten she agreed to be one of the parent chaperones – so of course she'd forgotten to tell her boss she needed to take the afternoon off. Merde. High school French does have its uses she thought as she texted her boss and hoped he'd be understanding. She needed the afternoon off.

xoxox

Oh. My. God. Jacqueline thought. I will never, ever, agree to be a parent chaperone again. It's hard enough to keep my own children acting civilized in public. Thirty of them? Impossible.

Luckily the teacher had the patience of a saint and plenty of experience managing a small horde of exuberant eight year-olds who had little to no interest in whatever the outing was about. Jacqueline and the other mother looked at each other and then at the teacher. They don't get paid nearly enough, Jacqueline said to the other mother. Fortunately all the two of them needed to do was bring up the rear and make sure any stragglers caught up with the group.

This was a perfect time to check her email. Only ten new ones since she last checked an hour ago and all of them could wait. Thank heavens for small favors. She pressed a link on her phone's web browser and found herself staring into the weary eyes of a soldier from the Great War.

She scanned the words on the web page – Lost Diggers, Cache, Photographs, Thuillier, Attic, France, Vignacourt and more words that didn't really register. But another link registered. Something mindless to do while the teacher chattered away and the children were relatively still.

She tapped the link and it came alive with a much smaller version of the large soldier and some instructions she didn't read and she tapped the screen again, not knowing what would come next. Another photograph of another soldier. And another and another and another as she tapped and tapped and tapped. All of these men were someone's son, father, grandfather, great-grandfather. They all needed to be identified. It was nothing to do with her. She knew who her great-grandfather was, what he looked like. But she kept tapping, the act becoming automatic, tapping faster and faster, not really paying any attention to the images flashing past on the screen.

Wait. Didn't her mother have a picture of her great-grandfather that looked a lot like these? A very young version of her great-grandfather? She grew up looking at a photograph of an older version of him every day of her life. It was on her mother's family wall of fame, as she jokingly called it. She forwarded the link in a text and pressed Send. Then she pressed Call.

"Mum? Yes, I'm fine. Yes, the kids are fine. Yes, I know it's the middle of the day. Everyone is fine. Don't you have a picture of your grandfather Jack from the Great War? Yes. Jack. I'm chaperoning an outing and … never mind, it's too hard to explain in a hurry. I've already sent you a text with a link. Go look at it and I'll ring you tonight."

xoxox

Elizabeth knew exactly which photograph Jacqueline was asking about. She could picture it perfectly in her mind. The uniformed young man in the photograph was looking straight at the photographer, serious but not stern, hands clasped in front of him. Elizabeth had seen that same expression hundreds of times in her life. It was the face of someone who carefully watched what was going on around him, just in case something required his attention.

Jack was so young in the photograph – not heartbreakingly young like many of the other photographs she'd clicked through – but far younger than she'd ever seen him. In the photo he must have been in his early twenties, married to Rosie Sanderson, full of hope he would return to her unscathed, his whole life ahead of him: children, rising through the ranks of the Victorian Police Force, then grandchildren. Knowing him, it would have been a quiet life well-lived.

His life didn't turn out quite as planned of course, and Elizabeth felt a tremor of sadness for his dashed dreams. But she was grateful they had been dashed because it meant he was part of her life, filling the void left when her own father had not come back from the jungles of Burma.

The problem was Elizabeth had no idea where the photograph was.

The photographs of him in her possession began a couple of years after her mother Jane first met him on the train to Ballarat. He was already in his late thirties then, already a Detective Inspector.

Elizabeth's earliest memory of her grandfather was of him scooping her up after she'd fallen on the front path. She was running to greet him as he came home from the station. She wasn't hurt but the indignity of the fall took her by surprise. He'd made a show of examining her knees, professing profound relief she was barely scraped, carefully and gently wiping away her tears with his handkerchief. Then he'd lifted her chin with one finger and asked "Better?" his blue eyes searching hers until she'd answered with a pouty nod, still shaken, still indignant. He distracted her from her pout by asking which book they were going to read next. He deposited her in her grandmother's arms while he took off his overcoat and his hat, then reclaimed her and carried her to the study where they sat down in his armchair.

Elizabeth got up from her computer and gathered the albums and the box holding everything else, needing to see the moment. She sat down on the couch and called to Jacqueline to join her. She could see a flash of impatience on her daughter's face but she ignored it. Jacqueline didn't realize it yet but this was the most important thing they were going to do today.

She flipped past the first day of school photos, school plays, piano recitals, graduation from high school. Her life's academic milestones, carefully recorded, until she came to the rest of the photographs, the really important ones, where the other side of her life, the loving side, was also carefully recorded.

Here it was. She was on Jack's lap, leaning into the curve of his arm around her, her thumb firmly in her mouth. He had a book of nursery rhymes in his hands and she was looking up to him as he read to her. Another photo, taken few minutes later, with Phryne, her grandmother, standing behind the chair, her arms enveloping them, both of them leaning into her as she took a turn reading a rhyme. Elizabeth could still feel her grandfather's voice and smell her grandmother's perfume.

Elizabeth's mother Jane always had her camera ready, always had fresh film close at hand. Jane had received a camera of her own one Christmas when she was a teenager and it became her constant companion. She must have taken dozens of pictures every month and developed them herself in Phryne's darkroom. Only a very few were staged; most were candid shots of Elizabeth with her grandparents. It was almost as though Jane was intent on recording her daughter's existence, probably because she had nothing of her own childhood until she became Phryne's ward. The same was true for Phryne; she had only a couple of childhood photos and a sketch of her sister Janey and a watercolor of the two of them. Elizabeth loved to hear about the pirate girls of Collingwood sailing off to adventure in their bathtub boat. At the end of each voyage her grandmother always included the story of how the picture came to be.

Where was the album with the photographs of her mother Jane? Ah. That's right. It was so small it was in the box. She opened the box and pulled out the small album. The photographs of her mother were even fewer and farther between after Jane went off to university. Here she was in cap and gown, holding her rolled vellum aloft, a look of triumph on her face. Here she was on her wedding day, her new husband in his Air Force uniform, the two of them gazing into each other's eyes, thinking their whole lives were ahead of them. And Jane with Elizabeth, whom he never saw, her newborn eyes tightly shut, the day Jack Robinson became the de facto father to another daughter.

Jacqueline was pulling things from the box while her mother talked and described the scenes in each photograph. She found an orchid and a sweet pea carefully pressed between tissue and cardboard and looked at her mother quizzically. "In a minute" her mother said. Two blue ribbons? "Those belonged to Janey, Phryne's sister." Jack's watch, the one he'd received during the war, the watch he wore every day except the days Phryne took it to the jeweler for a cleaning and a new strap. Jacqueline handed the watch to her mother but Elizabeth said "You hold it, please."

And then there were the notes: Phryne's to Jack and Jack's to Phryne. Some were loving and sweet, others were loving and sweetly provocative. Elizabeth smiled when she caught sight of a crinkly one in Jack's bundle, and she told Jacqueline about Jack and Phryne teaching her how to write secret messages using lemon juice for ink. Elizabeth didn't go through the notes again. She'd read them once; it was enough to know her grandparents loved each other very much. She didn't want to intrude on the thoughts dozing quietly on the folded stationery – untying the ribbons would wake them – so she gave them a gentle caress and told Jacqueline to read them when she had time to savor them. Elizabeth went back to the albums.

There were dozens of photos of Phryne and Jack through the years, almost all candid, but even in those that weren't they were always close, always with a hint of a smile on their faces and in their eyes. Sitting at the piano, her grandmother singing while her grandfather played, the ever-present pot of white orchids on the piano. She sometimes helped her grandfather water the orchid – carrying it to the kitchen, carefully wetting the bark in the pot but not letting any water touch the leaves, setting it on the counter to drain until it was dry enough to regain its place of honor in the parlor. On watering days her grandfather always pinched off a bloom and tucked it into a buttonhole of her grandmother's blouse or, if she had no buttons, swept her hair behind one ear and tucked it there. There was extra magic in the way they looked at each other on those days, grown-up magic she didn't understand. The first time she asked for an orchid blossom too her grandmother very gently explained every lady had her own special flower and it was time to choose one of her own. They took her outside and she trotted around the garden on still-chubby five year-old legs, calling 'this one' and 'this one' and 'this one' until her grandfather looked at her grandmother and they nodded at each other. 'This one' her grandfather called and he plucked a fragrant sweet pea and tucked it in her buttonhole. "Because you're our sweet pea" her grandmother smiled and pressed a kiss on Elizabeth's forehead.

Elizabeth slowly turned through the pages of the last album, still showing her daughter her life with her grandparents. Learning to ride her first bicycle, Jack holding one of the handlebars and the back of the seat while she got the feel of the pedals. Standing on the edge of the pool, terrified to jump in despite Jack's assurances he would catch her. In the next picture Phryne was standing next to her, holding her hand, promising to hold tight while they jumped in together. Sitting at her grandmother's dressing table, feeling very grown-up as Phryne tied new ribbons at the ends of her braids before a birthday lunch at the Windsor Hotel. As Elizabeth's life progressed Jack's hair grew greyer and greyer, Phryne's remaining resolutely black and sleek as she refused to succumb, teasing Jack that grey hair made him look distinguished and it was quite exciting to be involved with an older man. Usually Jack responded by pulling Phryne close and whispering something that made her laugh delightedly. Sometimes he just shook his head and smiled his slow smile at her, his eyes never leaving hers.

And then there were no more pages.

But in the box there were loose photos of friends and relatives. Birthday parties with Collins and Robinson grandchildren. One of Elizabeth and her namesake, Dr. Mac, her once fiery red hair turned snowy white.

Elizabeth didn't remember having seen some of these photos, but the last time she looked through the box must have been twenty years ago, maybe longer. She spread them out on the coffee table so she and Jacqueline could look at them together.

Bert standing by an old cab with a chamois in one hand and a cigarette in the other, Elizabeth in the driver's seat, pretending to drive. Cec and Alice and their large brood. There were several of Mr. Butler and his successor Kip, who was brought in when arthritis confounded Mr. Butler's efforts in the kitchen. An ancient photo of a short, heavy-set, well-dressed woman must be her grandmother's aunt, Prudence Stanley. Phryne, Jack, Dr. Mac in the parlor with an assortment of men and women Elizabeth didn't recognize at all. She flipped the photo – 'Twelfth Night 1930' was written on the back.

And then, there it was. The photograph of Jack that Jacqueline had asked about. It must have been in the box all these years.

xoxox

Jacqueline had a great tear rolling down each cheek and she was absently rubbing the face of her great-grandfather's watch. Elizabeth handed her a tissue and got up from the couch. She closed the box and carefully stacked the albums. "Take the albums home with you. I'll make a list of who is in all of these loose photographs and we can go through everything with the kids next Friday night."

xoxox

Jacqueline unlocked the front door, shooed the children in the house, and closed the door, again successfully thwarting the dog's fervent desire to explore the neighborhood unattended.

Once in the house, she switched to Friday night mode, telling the children to go through their backpacks now, please. Waiting until Sunday night was not an option.

She then dumped the armload of her possessions on her desk – keys, sunglasses, humongous handbag, mail. The doorbell rang and she greeted her mother who handed over a box once the door was closed.

Dinner? She called for pizza. Homework? Not tonight. It was Friday, after all. Baths? Hmmm. Yes. Both kids were pretty stinky, especially her son. Husband? Would be here soon. Stories? She and her mother had a box full of stories to tell them tonight. And tomorrow they were going to go see their great-great-grandparents.

xoxox

_A/N: I know this story was unbelievably sentimental, but my excuse is it's what appeared on my screen when I started typing. There are untold numbers of grandfathers who have taken the place of fathers who could not be in their children's lives, whatever the reason. Grandmothers, too, of course, but this story is about a grandfather._


	2. Chapter 2

_Thank you so much for your wonderful comments on the first chapter. I thought this little story was finished but a lovely review of my other story mentioned making poppies for the 5000 Poppies Project and I was inspired to find out more about poppies. Somehow that morphed into thinking about an eight-year old just beginning to understand what it means to be part of a much larger family than just herself, her mother and father, and her sometimes annoying little brother._

_20 January: I've tweaked this chapter to align with the changes I made in the first chapter._

_We're still in the present day._

xoxox

Saturday morning and the teacher was in the crafts store. She spent some time studying green floral wire to determine which would be the sturdiest and some more time studying cards of little black buttons to determine which would be the easiest to maneuver the wire through. Then she chose several packages of thick red and purple paper. She walked halfway to the checkout and returned for a package of green paper but decided against it. "Leaves would be nice," she thought, "but let's keep this as simple as possible. We won't have that much time."

xoxox

Monday morning and the children had just finished their history lesson. They'd already talked about Remembrance Day tomorrow and what it meant and how it was observed in Australia and around the world and the teacher thought they would enjoy watching a video she'd found about how animals were used to help armies in times of war. Now they had a few minutes before their lunch break and the teacher decided to let the children have a few minutes of relatively quiet vocal freedom.

"So, class, what did everyone do this weekend? Everyone say one thing and then it's the next person's turn. Starting here." She indicated the first desk in the first row to her right.

The answers were typical of eight-year olds, ranging from 'rode my bike' to 'played with my dog' to 'I don't remember' to 'went to the beach.' Then there was 'went to see my great-great grandpa.'

That was intriguing. She did some quick mental math. It was impossible anyone's great-great-grandfather was still alive.

"Tell me?" she asked.

"My mother has a picture of my great-great-grandpa Jack when he was in the army. So my whole family went to put flowers on his grave."

xoxox

Monday afternoon, about an hour before the end of the school day, the teacher told her students to put all their books and papers away and clear their desks. "Who remembers which flowers are used for Remembrance Day?"

Almost every hand shot up in the air and almost every voice cried in unison. "Poppies."

"Who remembers what color?"

Again almost every hand shot up in the air, and again almost every voice answered in unison. "Red."

"What if I told you 'purple too'? Does anyone know what purple poppies are for?"

This time there were no hands at all, just a sea of eight year-old faces looking back at her.

"We use red poppies to remember our soldiers who were in wars. What about their helpers? What kind of helpers did the soldiers have?"

The room was silent while the children puzzled out her question. She gave them a minute.

Bingo. Hands started rising. "Animals!" "Horses!" "Camels!" "Dogs!" "Pigeons!" "A cat!" "A bear!" "A monkey!" "Donkeys!"

"Right! Animals helped. And we can remember the animals with purple poppies. Get your scissors out of your desks," she said as she handed out sheets of red and purple paper. "This is what we're going to do…"

xoxox

When school let out for the day, all the other classes were surprised to see the front lawn of the school had been planted with red and purple paper poppies.

xoxox

Monday evening Jacqueline looked on as her children went through their backpacks looking for forms she needed to sign, graded papers she needed to review, and anything else that she needed to know about.

Her daughter very carefully pulled some thick red and purple paper, a small bundle of long green wires, and a card of small black buttons out of her backpack.

That's an interesting assortment, Jacqueline thought. Hmmm. "What's all that for?"

"It's to make poppies. Red poppies for people who were in wars. Purple poppies for animals that were in wars. We made them at school today and then we stuck them in the grass in front of school. You know, because tomorrow's Remembrance Day."

Jacqueline picked up the colored paper. Petal'ed outlines were already traced on each sheet and a very small hole was already punched in the middle of each outline. The green wires already had a bend at one end. She knew how the teacher had spent part of her weekend.

"I asked the teacher if I could bring some home so I can make some for our yard. I told her about going to see great-great-grandpa Jack's picture. I want to make one for Jack and one for Phryne because they were in the war and one for daddy's great-grandpa and one for his horse because they died in the war and…"

Jacqueline felt a tiny prickle of tears. Sometimes they really did listen. Sometimes the important things you were trying to teach them really did stick, even if at the time it seemed they weren't paying quite as much attention as you thought they should.

"Sweetie, that's a wonderful idea. Do you want some help cutting out the flowers?"

"Umm. Yes. Because we have a _lot_ of poppies to make. Remember all those other people grandma told us about?"

"Yes, I do remember. Is there something easy your brother can do?"

Her daughter considered that request. Her little brother was either going to bug her to let him help or he was going to just bug her. She might as well give him something to do. "He can put the buttons on the wires. And when daddy gets home he can twist the wires together to make the stems longer and then we all can stick them in the grass."

xoxox

_A/N: The video the children watched is on the ABC's website. Search for 'War Animals.' I learned about purple poppies from the Australian War Animal Memorials' website._


End file.
